I first came across this quote on the importance of risk when listening to one of Rob Moore’s great “Disruptive Entrepreneur” podcasts, although I’ve subsequently seen it attributed to both the US-based business coach and author, John Spence, and to Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg.

Whoever first coined it, though, is absolutely right. Business, like life, is about taking risks. Risks are critical to advancement. Without trying new things, taking risks, everything stagnates.

Evolution is continuous risk-taking – some things work and advance. Others don’t and fail.

In business, taking risks means trying new ways of doing things – whether small things like processes in your business or big things, like completely new businesses.

Imagine where we’d be today without the inventions of the past century.

Of course, risk-taking can be dangerous – especially for small businesses – and so needs to be managed.

Look carefully at what you’re planning to do. Understand the potential impact on your business (or you, personally) in terms of worst-case and best-case scenarios. Look at what mitigation strategies you have, or can develop, to use in the event things move more towards the worst-case scenario.

And different people, and businesses, have different levels of tolerance to risk – factors which need to be borne in mind when taking risks. So, include this in your planning.

Are you thinking continuously about how you can improve your business offering, or even about disrupting your current business completely by, in effect, replacing it with a completely new one?

Without taking risks, your business will eventually wither and die – “if you don’t risk anything, you risk everything.”

#BusinessFitness #Business #Disruption #Fear #Growth #Resilience #Risk #Success #QOTW

Other short posts relevant to this topic that you might find interesting include:

• Don’t wish it were easier, wish you were better.” – Jim Rohn
• “The best way to predict your future is to create it.” – Abraham Lincoln
• “Success breed complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.” – Andy Grove
• “Never change things by fighting the existing reality…to change something build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” – R. Buckminster Fuller
• “Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
• “Even if you are on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.” – Will Rodgers
• “We need to accept that we won’t always make the right decisions, that we’ll screw up royally sometimes – understanding that failure is not the opposite of success, it’s part of success.” – Arianna Huffington